Follow up blog to the baseball blog on the 9th...

So, yesterday, I went to Sapporo because there was an Alpha Course introductory seminar being held there. Afterwards, I met up with Alinna's sister, Kathleen who's here in Hokkaido with OMF.

Since I was in Sapporo, I figured, "Hey, I'll go find me a Nippon Ham Fighters ballcap." I think I went to about 3 sports stores, and none of em had a Nippon Ham Fighters cap. One store had all these caps for American Major League Baseball teams, even the throwback hats (like those nasty brown and yellow Padres hats... the Steve Garvey hats, yuck), but alas, they didn't have a single Japanese baseball team cap. I asked the clerk there, if they have any Japanese baseball caps and the guy looked at me kinda funny and said, "No, you're not gonna be able to find those around here. You're probably gonna hafta go to Sapporo Dome (the place where the Nippon Ham Fighters play) to get something like that."

Dude. How sad is that? You can get a nasty throwback Padres cap, but you can't get the local home team's cap. It's kinda like how it's cheaper for a Japanese person to travel to Hawaii, China, Korea, or Southeast Asia than it is to travel within Japan.

Oh, and Bob, it's the (Nippon Ham) Fighters. Not the (Nippon) Ham Fighters. The baseball teams here in Japan aren't affiliated with areas/cities like their American counterparts (i.e. San Francisco Giants, Oakland A's). Instead, Japanese baseball teams are affiliated with companies. For example, in the Yomiuri Giants' case, Yomiuri isn't a city's name but the name of a huge newspaper/media company. Hence, the Nippon Ham Fighters are not Ham Fighters at all, but sponsored by Nippon Ham, a company that makes... well... ham.